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Age may only be a number, but it turns out some of the oldest stars in the universe could be a lot younger than believed, according to new results from the Planck telescope. While scientists had previously estimated that the first stars began to shine 440m years after the Big Bang, itself pegged at 13.8 billion years ago, new results from the decommissioned ESA space telescope suggest that may have been off by as much as 100m years. Spilling the stars' age secrets are freshly calculated maps of cosmic background radiation, that help explain when reionization of the universe began.

The event that the Hubble space telescope captured this week only happens once or twice every ten years. What we're seeing here is three of the four Galilean satellites - moons, that is - moving around Jupiter's gaseous surface, all within the same frame at the same time. Their shadows are all in the frame at the same time, at least. Here you'll see the moons "Io", "Callisto", and our good friend "Europa." That last one we'll be visiting in the next 9 years if we're lucky.

The New Horizons mission has sent back its first photos here after 9 years and 1 month since launch. Onboard the LORRI craft, an 8.2-inch (20.8-centimeter) aperture focuses visible light to a charge-coupled device - a digital camera, that is to say, works with a telescope aimed directly at one of our furthest cousins in the Solar System: Pluto. February 4th (yesterday) also marks what would've been Clyde Tombaugh's 109th birthday - Tombaugh is credited with first discovering Pluto all the way back in 1930.

A paper has been produced by three researchers in which they predict the bite force of the largest rodent to have ever been discovered. Philip G. Cox, Andrés Rinderknecht, and Ernesto Blanco collaborated on a paper in which they suggest that the rodent called Josephoartigasia monesi used its incisors like tusks, "processing tough vegetation with large bite forces at the cheek teeth." Hows that for a horrifying image for you? A 2,205-pound (1000 kg) (over a ton) rodent with tusks, ready to eat your shrubberies at a moment's notice!

Let's get real about the NASA Jupiter moon Europa mission just given the thumbs-up by the White House yearly budget this week. While the news is booming, there's something important to remember - we're not nearly prepared yet to get there. NASA still needs to begin orbiting Jupiter with a craft like the Europe Clipper to get a better look at Europa. After that, a landing could possibly be attempted - and at that time we're looking at a touch-down "as early as" the year 2022.

Even with a $500-million-dollar boost compared to last year's total, NASA is only being provided with a potential 0.46% of the Federal Budget. While you'll hear many hearty claps and hoorays at the targets for this budget, this would be another in a long line of drops in percentage-of-total for the federal budget for NASA. The last time NASA received any amount over 1% of the total federal budget was back in 1993. Not that NASA could use the money for anything important like saving humans from an extinction level event, or anything like that.

The Big Bang theory has not been disproven. Get that idea out of your mind as fast as possible. Instead, a team of scientists have, this week, produced a paper which disproves their previous findings that suggest they'd found the first "direct evidence" that the Big Bang had happened in the way it's widely accepted to have happened. Instead of knowing when - 10 or so seconds after the Big Bang happened - the universe ballooned and expanded at a super-fast rate, we're back to where we were before the BICEP2 team announced their findings this past March. That's all.

The Hopkins' rose nudibranch sea slug has appeared in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Bodega Bay over the past couple of weeks. This is strange, according to local scientists, as these tiny slugs don't generally appear anywhere north of San Luis Obispo. It's been suggested that these pink creatures have found themselves in strange places due to changes in ocean temperature over the past year. These slugs are amongst several abnormal creatures to appear in the area here in early 2015.

While the European Space Agency (ESA) lost contact with their comet lander Philae in November, "there is good confidence" they'll be able to make contact once more. So says Stephan Ulamec, lander manager at the German Space Agency (DLR). Ulamec also warned that should the ESA get in contact with Philae via Rosetta, "it may be that they only get very limited periods of operation in the [dark] pocket, and they will have to plan for more modest science sequences." If Philae is able to reach out to Rosetta, that is.

This week we're seeing the next generation in Raspberry Pi technology. For those of you that've never heard of the Raspberry Pi, it's a barebones computer that's made to be exceedingly cheap whilst retaining functionality for do-it-yourself electronics makers. In other words - it's the brain for your next robot. This second major wave release is being put out for the same price as the most recent Raspberry Pi unit, but here you're getting a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU with 6x the performance of the previous best board.